THE GREAT SEA-SERPENT. 93 not been reading stories, and who had kept their eyes open, _ instead of sitting down to wait for Perseus. True enough, it was the gun. The men in the boat had shot the Dragon, and the noise echoed and re-echoed out to sea. “ He’s hit!” cried the crowd. And so it seemed. “ He’ll swamp the boat!” For a minute the crowd on shore thought it was all over with the daring marksmen; and as for the marksmen them- selves, the “ History of Gloucester” does not relate what they thought ! For a minute, the ugly creature made for shore, and made for the boat, still as straight as the tide. Within thirty feet of the boat he suddenly turned. He seemed to have forgot- ten both the shot and the boat. In the breakers that the bending of his huge body made, he whirled and put out to sea. So he seems to have been a very amiable Dragon, after all, and not to have had a sensitive disposition, either. And so the men in the boat put ashore, a trifle pale about the mouth, but too much disappointed, I suspect, at not having caught the Dragon, to thank him for not sending them and their boat and their gun to the bottom with a whisk of his mighty tail. And so Andromeda left her stone and her fright, and the golden mist came up the harbor, and she married Perseus, and never saw the Dragon more. The Dragon amused himself, however, for a while there- after, by racing up and down the harbor like a huge regatta,